Don't remember his name but he commanded a small carrier in the Atlantic during WW2. He said that if a soldier prays before going into battle he is going into battle with the wrong mind set. A soldier should take charge, not leave it up the fate/beard in the sky.
He has a point. In Islam, the idea of "It is the will of god" is very strong, stronger then in most faiths. It is a fatalist attitude. Whatever happens has been pre-determined and it is useless to go against it.
It is kinda funny to see then Muslims use it when they go into war. Since Muslims always loose unless they fight each other (which is another kind of loosing), obviously the loosing is the will of god. Notice how the phrase "if Allah wants it" is rarely used AFTER the lost battle.
But are Christians and Jews really that different? Yes. A lot of the advancement in the west has been due to religion taking a back seat. Take Einstein, religious but doesn't let it control him. The west still has various religions but the advances were strongest when church and state or at least science and culture were separated.
Not that this has nothing to do with the faiths themselves. Fatalism is determined by environment. In Europe, the environment allows people to take charge. There are flooded areas but they are small and so you can build small raised areas to build your house on. And now your house doesn't flood away every year, you can start building dyke's. You can influence the environment in small ways, allowing you to build up to big ways. There is a reason the greatest land reclaimers are the dutch where doing it with primitive tools was relatively easy AND rewarding.
Fatalism is a survival strategy when your entire dependence is on a river that may or may not flood and which you can do nothing about. When a dry spell doesn't mean a lesser harvest but mass starvation. when all your work is wiped out in front of your eyes, it helps to think that it is all part of some divine plan. Raising your hands in anger at the gods... doesn't work for to long before you die of a heart attack. Just accept it, bury the death and move on.
And when YOU do that, when you have given up, it becomes VERY hard to accept someone else can move on. That is why in ghetto's there is enormous peer pressure NOT to succeed but to fail. Because if someone else CAN make it, then you are a bigger failure.
And that is another aspect of Islam. The world moved on and in general they can't move on. Look at Turkey, flexing its wings because it thinks that massive growth when you came from nothing has meaning it KNOWS it is completely at the mercy of the west. Every time a Turk answers his cell phone, uses his computer, powers a light, it is western tech. And despite billions invested from oil rich nations, this hasn't really changed.
Why? Because Islam never had a renascence. They never had an enlightenment. Individuals have moved on and learned to seperate faith from daily live but as a group, in general, it hasn't. And it is causing massive culture conflict.
Note the huge problems Israel is having because by its nature it has to be friendly to ultra-orthodox Jews.
In most of the west, the religious freaks have isolated themselves and good riddance. There is no Amish TV channel trying to win heart and minds. More or less, the US can ignore them. Good luck doing that with Islamic extremist. Note how the revolutions so far have not yet lead to a progressive government. Moderate muslims is about as good as it gets and moderate is a very inaccurate term. It completely depends on how extreme the non-moderates are.
Mind you, nothing of this is new. We had Darwin on trial. It is just annoying to have to fight the same battle over and over again. And last time we didn't insist on importing Hillbilly's by the truck load.
Culture clash sounds so harmless but it is the root at many of the worst moment in human history.
I got a stack of CD's somewhere of all the games I bought, it is about a meter high. Just the CD's, no cases. I threw the big box of floppies away. 3.5 inch mostly, I am not THAT old... yes... I also had tapes once... guess I am that old.
Anyway, I once bought games. Like say... Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by a company called LucasGames. Heard of them? It came with a book you could kill a fairly large spider with. X-wing? Came with a pamflet. Later CD games? PDF on the CD.
There used to be a time you got maps, maybe a thin figure, stickers, a MANUAL. Something IN the box. They stopped doing that and then stopped giving you a box. Saved space on the shelve... yes it did. Do you know how I save even more space? By downloading.
There used to be a time when games were FINISHED when you downloaded them and they had WEEKS of gameplay. Take X-Wing, there was no way you could complete it. And when you were ready for more after say half a year, there was an expansion pack with a complete new campaign and a new plane. It had WEIGHT.
Nowadays? Oblivion and the horse armour... Dragon Age and the gift pack. Just a few dialog lines extra for 5 bucks...
If you courted your girlfriend and had sex with her, then a dinner for a blowjob is an okay deal. But if she then expects after all that courting she demands a diamond ring in exchange for a link to her pics online so you can go whack off, you feel a bit cheated.
Here are some recent games I downloaded and STILL wanted my money back:
Driver San Francisco. My god, have you EVER heard of a difficulty mode? And how about the option to skip some stuff. Non-linear my ass. A hub in which you got to all the sub-hubs is not non-linear. I don't enjoy timed races where it is obvious the driver who set the time had a better setup then me and better reflexes (I will get to this later if you are still reading this)
Skyrim. Can the interface be any more pathetic? Is it possible to have any lower res textures? Can game designers FINALLY start coding for machine with more then 2gb of memory as in 64 bit?
Remember the bit about the reflexes? What are most of the pirated games aimed at? EA does just FINE with The Sims. MAYBE Ubisoft shouldn't make so many testosterone filled teenage boy games and aim their games at a more mature audience. I still play games AND I can easily afford them. Special edition for an extra hundred (if it is available, Skyrim special edition didn't go on sale in Holland), I lap it up. I got the money you want. But I am not interested in yet another dystopian FPS.
It is very easy to blame piracy but there are two reasons people pirate. Because they can't afford your game or because the game doesn't interest them enough to buy it. I often fall in the last class. Driver I played for maybe two hours and then gave up. Nice enough but clearly not aimed at my old ass. So, I don't buy it, just play the extended demo courtesy of the pirate bay for a laugh.
Get some good, fully made for the PC games out and not aimed at 12yr old boys and you will make it big. Ask EA.
One very simple solution to a LOT of the problems in Holland is to cut the train journeys up. Right now you got a service that runs from Heerlen to Den Helder and Nijmegen to Alkmaar. For those to whom this means nothing? It is the line you are on between Amsterdam and Utrecht, a VERY busy section of track WITH a HUGE bottle neck because it is 2 tracks only in Amsterdam, the capitol. So if a train gets stuck at Amstel (small station in Amsterdam) everything is stuck.
Heerlen is about as far south as you can go without having to learn Belgian and if you go any further north then Den Helder you better have flippers.
There aren't many people making the full journey. It takes more then 2 hours and that in Holland is a long journey.
BUT nonetheless, THAT is the route. Because when it was proposed to cut it up into sections so that a delay in one part of the country would not affect everywhere else, the train personel went on strike. They didn't want customer friendly, they wanted long journeys.
Right now, public transport service is rated as the WORSED service of ANYTHING in Holland. They don't care.
So good luck getting anything like this idea in place.
But the passengers aren't much better. Such a docking would be limitted in length. So what do you if a passenger is terminally slow? Any idea about speed has to consider that in the general public there are people who just aren't capable. Just plain capable. I am not talking about handicapped people, I am talking about people who just plain can't deal with life and freeze up. Train delays are most often caused by people being idiots. Somebody pulls the emergency chain because they suddenly realize they are in the wrong train.
Or elderly people stand up while the train is switching in front of a station and fall over.
The idea is not new. Moving sidewalks have done it and some entertainment rides have you step on a rotation platform to get into boats being pulled around the platform. And what they also got is a LOT of attendants to deal with the genetic waste who can't handle it.
Come up with any new idea to improve anything and you have to imagine in your mind a person you know with average IQ. Then remember that half the population is more stupid then that.
Simple example? You could speed up regular traffic if you switched the lights in a second flat. More then enough time for anyone with a brain to react and come to a stop. But you got to deal with the soccer moms who can't drive and drink coffee and do their make up and make a call at the same time. That is why lights take ages to change, for the slowest hanger on of the human race.
BUT then I read the article and found out that Brendan Smith SELF-CENSORED his book at the request of Sam's Club in order to make more money.
So... I am supposed to care that a guy who willingly took a dick up his ass got more then he bargained for?
Hell no. Smith approves of censor ship in name of the almighty dollar well, then he has to go all the way. If you want me to care about your lack of freedom you shouldn't have given it away first. This guy has no principles clearly, he only cares about selling less books.
Let this be a warning, you can NOT negotiate with religious extremist. Give them a finger and they rip of your arm then beat you with it. Why do you think Larry Flint the smut peddler was defended by civil rights groups? Not for the sake of porn itself.
Lets see. Coal. Expensive to mine from underground and a blight on the load in open mines. Nuclear material? Same issues with mining it and that love waste to get rid off. Oil? That is running out and drilling for it has proved hazardous. Mining it from tar sand is even worse then coal mining and even just transporting it ain't save.
Funny the article doesn't mention any of that. Or for that matter that efficient generators ANYWHERE need rare earth magnets. In the end, almost all power generation needs the same kind of generator, the only difference is what makes them spin and how efficient you want them to be.
And yes, desert water is not infinite... Greenland is a desert now? Funny. I expected them to be warmer. And less wet.
Troll article cherry picks arguments to support its troll and ignores everything else.
It is for social wankers. 4.7 or 6? Okay, Kang Soo-kyung, political prisoner for the last 40 years in isolation in North Korea. Connect!
Okay, Yenplu Onyango or rather that would have been her name is she lived out today but she like many kids die each day in Afrtica. Connect!
It is just the modern version of "in a past life I was King of Sheba". Note how nobody ever was a nobody in a past life like they are in their current life.
Or those ancestor tracking things. Yes, everyone in Europe is a descendant of one king. Big deal, we are also a decendant of the whores he shagged. But that is not mentioned. EVER. Would ruin the moment.
One time I was forced to sit through such a session of seperation. Yes, I knew a guy who once talked to Obama. Big whoop. Hell I am a nobel myself AND distant relatives run a country. Still am a nobody who doesn't know anybody. And so are you. Happy dreams.
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing while Windows did one of its routine crashes. The crashes I had learned to live with but the music constantly interrupting because of it I had not.
Then I learned of course that on Linux you could keep a browser open. Just open. You know, open. Where you left it and come back to it and not found the system had crashes and lost all your search history.
The obviousness of Groupons scam is obvious enough to most but the more subtle one is the lie of advertising. Advertising does NOT work as advertised. That is something to remember, advertising is a product SOLD by advertising agencies. So the companies telling you advertising works because they studied it are advertising companies... conflict of interests?
You have two basics forms of advertising. The first people barely think about but is putting your products and your shop on display. It is not just the sign above your door but prices on your products. Think about this simple thing, did you EVER walk out of store because you couldn't find the price so thought "fuck this". BAD advertising. A lot about this basic advertising is convincing people to enter your shop because they think that what they want can be got at an acceptable price. For stores like bakeries this means charging the right amount for the right amount of convenience and quality. People complain about Starbucks being to expensive but they got fast steady quality service (compared to all the other alternatives at premium locations. I can get a cup at a burger chain for less next door at say Utrecht Central station in Holland but GOD the burger joints service is piss poor).
But if you want MORE customers then pass by traffic. What do you do... advertise? Do you READ advertisements? No? To busy. Exactly. Anyone that can afford a 5 dollar cup cake is far to busy to read the local newspaper. Same with banner ads. Who here sees banner ads? If you see banner ads, you are in a lower class. Elitist? Damn right.
Research has shown the Groupon's claims on age and income of their users are over-estimated. They are an older demographic and a poorer demographic. This is a group who hunts coupon's. They use a coupon and then don't come back unless they get another coupon. They are deal hunters.
If you got something to dump, then deal hunters might be worth going after but if you got a premium product that doesn't get 75% cheaper in total costs with bulk, then Groupon makes no sense.
Groupon works for HP Printers because HP makes its money on ink. It makes sense for products you need to shift now and you got to much off or make a very high margin on but otherwise, it NEVER makes sense.
Food products and services do not work with massive discounts aimed at bargain hunters.
It would be like selling Rolls Royce at 75% discount hoping for repeat business.
Not only do people not NEED two of them but those who buy it at the discount can't afford the regular price AND at the same time you are diluting the price of your product for your regular customers.
Or how would you feel if the person in front of you paid 1/4th of the price charged to you? If I was in that store behind a groupon customer and they tried to charge me full price they would be picking cupcakes out of their ears.
A european chain stunts with taxless days, basically a 20% cut that amounts to the regular sales tax. So... I never buy from them unless they run one of these events because I can wait for them or another chain to run one when buying a TV or such. Turn your customers into bargain hunters and bargains they will hunt.
Stay away from advertising unless you truly and fully understand what it is going to cost and what it is going to deliver you. It is like gambling. Or lawsuits. Casino's, lawyers and advertisers ALWAYS win.
To keep the law is amazingly hard if people don't want to. It is rarely touched upon but the police heavily relies on the good will of the people its patrols else it will soon become clear how you can keep 99% down with far less then 1%. See Libya. Khadaffi and his sons looked more suprised then anything else at the end. WTF happened. And then he died at the hand of a pauper he didn't even know existed.
In Holland there was a recent story about the police not knowing what to do with the person who has been drink driving for 30 years. In Holland we have no 3 strike rule OR consecutive sentences. This means the entire punishment system is basically, don't do it again or we will have to ask you again.
This works... for those people that want to obey the laws (drink driving is dangerous for yourself and most people don't want to hurt other people) but not for those who don't. It doesn't really matter whether YOU consider a law just or unjust, if you don't feel like obeying it, you won't.
Try this, for the essential Godwin. Say you could travel back in time and kill Hitler. Would you? It is murder and you WILL die for it. Will you do it? Maybe you wouldn't but say your grandfather who did live through it, would he? Would he commit murder for say a pair of sneakers?
People have come to accept downloading content without paying for it as acceptable. Just as people wanting to travel back in time to kill X see it as acceptable to kill someone for a crime not yet committed. Because many of us have told ourselves that content creators are basically screwing us up the ass and the only way to get them back is to screw them back. By not paying. Voting with your dollars. It is hard to argue with this when for instance game companies seem so deaf to their customers.
Simple example. RPG type games and the invisible helmet option. It is a trivial thing to implement. A checkbox on the config screen that does or does not render the helmet so you can have the stats but also can see the face of the character you spent ages creating. Believe it or not but it matters to same sad people like me.
Any game coder who can confirm this? Oh hell, it ain't hard, kiddies on the net have implemented it within a few days of release with no toolkit. Skyrim is just the latest offender. And it is not as if they didn't have a warning. Dragon Age had the same problem AND again, it was users that had to fix it.
Hell Bethseda doesn't even SELL the collectors edition in my region. Just buying the regular edition instead will not send a signal to them. Neither will downloading the game but at least it saves me 40 bucks. They upset about me downloading. Me upset about NOT being able to spend a 140 bucks AND getting a buggy game with missing basic options that by now the industry should have figured out.
What all this ranting is supposed to lead to is that it is very hard to change peoples mind once they are made up. How many of you think it is okay to litter? Okay, most probably said no. How many of those smoke and do NOT throw their cigarette away whereever it damn well pleases them? Now, to clean up this pollution, each cigarette will have a 1 dollar charge added to it to clean up after your filthy addict ass. Agree?
No? But that is what the copyright charge on blank media is.
The only thing that charge did and a litter charge on cigarettes will do, is convince people they are now entitled to commit the offence they paid a fine for.
The cat is out of the bag and as any cat owner knows, it is impossible to put the cat back in.
Has EVERYONE forgotten about.mobi and.travel? There ARE already industry specific TLD's and they failed dismally. In fact, I am in the industry and when I asked at fairly high level people why.xxx was expected to go any better then.travel and.mobi it was awfully silent.
INCLUDING about the claim "well if nobody wants it the price will just drop" with the question "But you invested a fortune in lobbying so you will then just give up instead of using your bought politicians to mandate porn sites to buy an XXX domain".
Baby steps. First you register the jews, then you make them identifiable, well you know the rest. Godwin? Yes absolutely, it is not about the eradiction of undesirables BUT the.xxx domain has some very odd supporters. Lots of politicians that would dearly love to see porn gone (and freedom of expression) supported the.xxx domain. Why? I think a phase 2 might happen maybe not by design but by the business behind it who spend a fortune getting this wanting to make sure it succeeds. Again with Godwin but do you think the census takers at IBM who recorded the faith of people in Germany knew the final solution?
Anyway, ICANN has long been thinking about launching endless TLD's. Think.gun or.apple is bad? How about.paris and.washington? Each town, their own TLD, every business their own TLD.
.xxx is an experiment. Not so much about whether their is a market but how a market can be forcible created.
A lot of people think they can get.xxx to work for them, it is sold to some porn companies as in that the.xxx domain will be more legit so they can get better deals with mainstream business for advertising... yes, they really are that stupid.
Playboy had no problem getting mainstream advertising but most porn sites are a squalid dirty mag that even the industry itself would be reluctant to advertise in.
But you can claim you read playboy.COM for the articles. Good luck doing that with playboy.xxx
For decades the industry has attempted to seem legit, that they are just a business, just like Playboy is. And now a lot of them think the best way to do that is cover their faces in the cum of the.xxx tld. Yeah, that will work. Why not wear a star and paint your face black (the only difference between Germany and the US is that you don't need to get blacks to wear anything to tell them apart. People can just tell it seems. Must be the big noses)
All the other tech companies are used to dealing with Microsoft itself as partner, either for a product or in commitee. B&N probably has no relationship with MS other then as an end customer of Windows. Now that alone is enough to fuel a bitter hatred.
But basically, B&N has nothing to loose. If they loose they have to pay the same fee as if they didn't. It is not as if MS can hurt them in any other way.
Meanwhile MS has in one move ruined ALL its attempts to appear as if it wasn't the old evil MS anymore. The MS apologists who claim MS is no longer against openess or unwilling to play fair... well... they got to crawl back under the rock they came from and claim that this time MS Mobile Windows Phone Gazillion will be it!
First off, Jesus does not exist and if he did exist, do you think a guy nailed to a cross would cry for Americans who pollute the world and consume its resources and are to stupid to vote for Bush or anyone not Bush?
Thousands die of hunger and some beard in the sky is supposed to care for you?
How old was Dennis Ritchie when he died just recently? WELL above 50. If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood.
Anyway, when recorded music was itself new, it didn't need long at all to be understood by politics and have the current copyright introduced. It is about the maturity in the industry as in knowing how the game is played (bribes). Google just doesn't get it.
This ad is a good example. Wall of text rather then a heart-warming story of innocent and pure-blooded American Google being bastarized by the evil japanse Sony music.
If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable. A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream. Sure it sucks for the people down stream and there might be a lot of people downstream but the risk is calculable and limited.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents. Or at least not reliable enough. The public might want safe power but they are not willing to pay the price of 1 nuclear accident every couple decades.
Nuclear energy is the same as oil drilling, techs that for many reasons are necessary but nobody wants in their back yard OR simply spend enough money on to make it safe. And when it fails, it fails so enormously that people lose all sense of proportion. Hey Japan, sure you lost a sizable area of your country BUT you build your economy on cheap electricity. Surely it is worth it because you thought it was worth it back then when you decided to build them? Oh, that is not how voters think? How unexpected.
Nuclear tech doesn't fit in a capitalist democracy. You can't have reactors build by the lowest bidder at the whim of voters with no accountability.
Remember that money makes for strange bedfellows. For instance, take Reuters. They been found to be lying in their reporting in this area... but what few THEN ask, why they ALWAYS been found lying to favor one side.
And if these companies are aiding Iran in keeping its nuclear facilities safe are they aiding it in nuclear development which it is not allowed to do according to UN regulations?
This whole case has more depth to it then just the west vs Iran. Somebody is playing games and we so far only got researchers with funny names and shady funding and Iran to prove any of this.
Remember this all originates from a country that blaims earth quakes on short skirts. To some the truth is not just a flexible concept but nothing different from propaganda shouted really loudly.
Neither was nazi germany all that bad, as long as you weren't on the list. That is why such regimes can continue to exist, because the majority isn't on the list and it is very unhuman (but very human) to risk getting on a list for someone else who is on a list.
That is why real heroes, like the people of Urk (fairly strict christians who had no real love or hate for jews but disliked people telling them what to do with a passion) are so fucking rare. It takes balls of steels to risk your safety for someone else. The fast majority did not. Ich habe es nicht gewust really means, I spend all my time looking the other way so it wouldn't happen to me.
And the US has been caught out many many times recently and in the past in making people disappear. Check all the foreign detainment camps operated by the CIA. It is not even a secret anymore, except by those like you who choose to look the other way.
He is the 1%. The king and his court are hardly going to be advocating for the foundation of a republic are they?
Remember this next time you watch TV or any other media. How many of the people you see in media are making minimum wage or even an average wage.
For that matter, how many here on slashdot do a real days work? Hint, it is 10:30 in holland as I post this. Do you think a factory worker has the same luxury?
I am not the 1%, I am somewhere in the middle but I came from the bottom and know just how much you can expect from the 1% in caring even the tiniest bit about anyone else. Bloomberg can paint himself with a donkey or an elephant, in reality he is filthy rich and cares only for himself.
And if you are discussing secrets in a cab... then what about the cabby overhearing smartass? Or are cabbies in your world deaf dumb and blind like you?
Here is a hint, if you got secrets, don't discuss them in other peoples places.
Name the tech giants. Siemens, Samsung, Sony, Toyota etc etc. Where do you think these companies came from? Where was the CD invented? TU-Delft Holland and Tokyo japan. You are right, there is no direct equivelant of Silicon valley. That is like saying that because no mountain ranges are the same as the alps the US doesn't have mountains.
Read tech news a bit more carefully, most of them have nothing to do with Silicon Valley anymore then the best movies got much to do with Hollywood.
But hey kid, keep dreaming the dream and everything will be alright... oh remind me again, how much of iPad tech is actually from the US? Produced in the US? So, you got a nerd producing the next big thing that never happens. Meanwhile the real world is going on elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh, so... no secret Jewish courts but there are a lot of Sharia courts. Mmm, kinda ruins your whole argument doesn't it?
Because being a religous prick stop them from breaking commandments... only sinners need forgiveness.
You are a dreamer. That is fine just don't vote. That should be left to people in the real world.
Don't remember his name but he commanded a small carrier in the Atlantic during WW2. He said that if a soldier prays before going into battle he is going into battle with the wrong mind set. A soldier should take charge, not leave it up the fate/beard in the sky.
He has a point. In Islam, the idea of "It is the will of god" is very strong, stronger then in most faiths. It is a fatalist attitude. Whatever happens has been pre-determined and it is useless to go against it.
It is kinda funny to see then Muslims use it when they go into war. Since Muslims always loose unless they fight each other (which is another kind of loosing), obviously the loosing is the will of god. Notice how the phrase "if Allah wants it" is rarely used AFTER the lost battle.
But are Christians and Jews really that different? Yes. A lot of the advancement in the west has been due to religion taking a back seat. Take Einstein, religious but doesn't let it control him. The west still has various religions but the advances were strongest when church and state or at least science and culture were separated.
Not that this has nothing to do with the faiths themselves. Fatalism is determined by environment. In Europe, the environment allows people to take charge. There are flooded areas but they are small and so you can build small raised areas to build your house on. And now your house doesn't flood away every year, you can start building dyke's. You can influence the environment in small ways, allowing you to build up to big ways. There is a reason the greatest land reclaimers are the dutch where doing it with primitive tools was relatively easy AND rewarding.
Fatalism is a survival strategy when your entire dependence is on a river that may or may not flood and which you can do nothing about. When a dry spell doesn't mean a lesser harvest but mass starvation. when all your work is wiped out in front of your eyes, it helps to think that it is all part of some divine plan. Raising your hands in anger at the gods... doesn't work for to long before you die of a heart attack. Just accept it, bury the death and move on.
And when YOU do that, when you have given up, it becomes VERY hard to accept someone else can move on. That is why in ghetto's there is enormous peer pressure NOT to succeed but to fail. Because if someone else CAN make it, then you are a bigger failure.
And that is another aspect of Islam. The world moved on and in general they can't move on. Look at Turkey, flexing its wings because it thinks that massive growth when you came from nothing has meaning it KNOWS it is completely at the mercy of the west. Every time a Turk answers his cell phone, uses his computer, powers a light, it is western tech. And despite billions invested from oil rich nations, this hasn't really changed.
Why? Because Islam never had a renascence. They never had an enlightenment. Individuals have moved on and learned to seperate faith from daily live but as a group, in general, it hasn't. And it is causing massive culture conflict.
Note the huge problems Israel is having because by its nature it has to be friendly to ultra-orthodox Jews.
In most of the west, the religious freaks have isolated themselves and good riddance. There is no Amish TV channel trying to win heart and minds. More or less, the US can ignore them. Good luck doing that with Islamic extremist. Note how the revolutions so far have not yet lead to a progressive government. Moderate muslims is about as good as it gets and moderate is a very inaccurate term. It completely depends on how extreme the non-moderates are.
Mind you, nothing of this is new. We had Darwin on trial. It is just annoying to have to fight the same battle over and over again. And last time we didn't insist on importing Hillbilly's by the truck load.
Culture clash sounds so harmless but it is the root at many of the worst moment in human history.
I got a stack of CD's somewhere of all the games I bought, it is about a meter high. Just the CD's, no cases. I threw the big box of floppies away. 3.5 inch mostly, I am not THAT old... yes... I also had tapes once... guess I am that old.
Anyway, I once bought games. Like say... Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by a company called LucasGames. Heard of them? It came with a book you could kill a fairly large spider with. X-wing? Came with a pamflet. Later CD games? PDF on the CD.
There used to be a time you got maps, maybe a thin figure, stickers, a MANUAL. Something IN the box. They stopped doing that and then stopped giving you a box. Saved space on the shelve... yes it did. Do you know how I save even more space? By downloading.
There used to be a time when games were FINISHED when you downloaded them and they had WEEKS of gameplay. Take X-Wing, there was no way you could complete it. And when you were ready for more after say half a year, there was an expansion pack with a complete new campaign and a new plane. It had WEIGHT.
Nowadays? Oblivion and the horse armour... Dragon Age and the gift pack. Just a few dialog lines extra for 5 bucks...
If you courted your girlfriend and had sex with her, then a dinner for a blowjob is an okay deal. But if she then expects after all that courting she demands a diamond ring in exchange for a link to her pics online so you can go whack off, you feel a bit cheated.
Here are some recent games I downloaded and STILL wanted my money back:
Driver San Francisco. My god, have you EVER heard of a difficulty mode? And how about the option to skip some stuff. Non-linear my ass. A hub in which you got to all the sub-hubs is not non-linear. I don't enjoy timed races where it is obvious the driver who set the time had a better setup then me and better reflexes (I will get to this later if you are still reading this)
Skyrim. Can the interface be any more pathetic? Is it possible to have any lower res textures? Can game designers FINALLY start coding for machine with more then 2gb of memory as in 64 bit?
Remember the bit about the reflexes? What are most of the pirated games aimed at? EA does just FINE with The Sims. MAYBE Ubisoft shouldn't make so many testosterone filled teenage boy games and aim their games at a more mature audience. I still play games AND I can easily afford them. Special edition for an extra hundred (if it is available, Skyrim special edition didn't go on sale in Holland), I lap it up. I got the money you want. But I am not interested in yet another dystopian FPS.
It is very easy to blame piracy but there are two reasons people pirate. Because they can't afford your game or because the game doesn't interest them enough to buy it. I often fall in the last class. Driver I played for maybe two hours and then gave up. Nice enough but clearly not aimed at my old ass. So, I don't buy it, just play the extended demo courtesy of the pirate bay for a laugh.
Get some good, fully made for the PC games out and not aimed at 12yr old boys and you will make it big. Ask EA.
One very simple solution to a LOT of the problems in Holland is to cut the train journeys up. Right now you got a service that runs from Heerlen to Den Helder and Nijmegen to Alkmaar. For those to whom this means nothing? It is the line you are on between Amsterdam and Utrecht, a VERY busy section of track WITH a HUGE bottle neck because it is 2 tracks only in Amsterdam, the capitol. So if a train gets stuck at Amstel (small station in Amsterdam) everything is stuck.
Heerlen is about as far south as you can go without having to learn Belgian and if you go any further north then Den Helder you better have flippers.
There aren't many people making the full journey. It takes more then 2 hours and that in Holland is a long journey.
BUT nonetheless, THAT is the route. Because when it was proposed to cut it up into sections so that a delay in one part of the country would not affect everywhere else, the train personel went on strike. They didn't want customer friendly, they wanted long journeys.
Right now, public transport service is rated as the WORSED service of ANYTHING in Holland. They don't care.
So good luck getting anything like this idea in place.
But the passengers aren't much better. Such a docking would be limitted in length. So what do you if a passenger is terminally slow? Any idea about speed has to consider that in the general public there are people who just aren't capable. Just plain capable. I am not talking about handicapped people, I am talking about people who just plain can't deal with life and freeze up. Train delays are most often caused by people being idiots. Somebody pulls the emergency chain because they suddenly realize they are in the wrong train.
Or elderly people stand up while the train is switching in front of a station and fall over.
The idea is not new. Moving sidewalks have done it and some entertainment rides have you step on a rotation platform to get into boats being pulled around the platform. And what they also got is a LOT of attendants to deal with the genetic waste who can't handle it.
Come up with any new idea to improve anything and you have to imagine in your mind a person you know with average IQ. Then remember that half the population is more stupid then that.
Simple example? You could speed up regular traffic if you switched the lights in a second flat. More then enough time for anyone with a brain to react and come to a stop. But you got to deal with the soccer moms who can't drive and drink coffee and do their make up and make a call at the same time. That is why lights take ages to change, for the slowest hanger on of the human race.
BUT then I read the article and found out that Brendan Smith SELF-CENSORED his book at the request of Sam's Club in order to make more money.
So... I am supposed to care that a guy who willingly took a dick up his ass got more then he bargained for?
Hell no. Smith approves of censor ship in name of the almighty dollar well, then he has to go all the way. If you want me to care about your lack of freedom you shouldn't have given it away first. This guy has no principles clearly, he only cares about selling less books.
Let this be a warning, you can NOT negotiate with religious extremist. Give them a finger and they rip of your arm then beat you with it. Why do you think Larry Flint the smut peddler was defended by civil rights groups? Not for the sake of porn itself.
Lets see. Coal. Expensive to mine from underground and a blight on the load in open mines. Nuclear material? Same issues with mining it and that love waste to get rid off. Oil? That is running out and drilling for it has proved hazardous. Mining it from tar sand is even worse then coal mining and even just transporting it ain't save.
Funny the article doesn't mention any of that. Or for that matter that efficient generators ANYWHERE need rare earth magnets. In the end, almost all power generation needs the same kind of generator, the only difference is what makes them spin and how efficient you want them to be.
And yes, desert water is not infinite... Greenland is a desert now? Funny. I expected them to be warmer. And less wet.
Troll article cherry picks arguments to support its troll and ignores everything else.
How unexpected.
It is for social wankers. 4.7 or 6? Okay, Kang Soo-kyung, political prisoner for the last 40 years in isolation in North Korea. Connect!
Okay, Yenplu Onyango or rather that would have been her name is she lived out today but she like many kids die each day in Afrtica. Connect!
It is just the modern version of "in a past life I was King of Sheba". Note how nobody ever was a nobody in a past life like they are in their current life.
Or those ancestor tracking things. Yes, everyone in Europe is a descendant of one king. Big deal, we are also a decendant of the whores he shagged. But that is not mentioned. EVER. Would ruin the moment.
One time I was forced to sit through such a session of seperation. Yes, I knew a guy who once talked to Obama. Big whoop. Hell I am a nobel myself AND distant relatives run a country. Still am a nobody who doesn't know anybody. And so are you. Happy dreams.
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing while Windows did one of its routine crashes. The crashes I had learned to live with but the music constantly interrupting because of it I had not.
Then I learned of course that on Linux you could keep a browser open. Just open. You know, open. Where you left it and come back to it and not found the system had crashes and lost all your search history.
The obviousness of Groupons scam is obvious enough to most but the more subtle one is the lie of advertising. Advertising does NOT work as advertised. That is something to remember, advertising is a product SOLD by advertising agencies. So the companies telling you advertising works because they studied it are advertising companies... conflict of interests?
You have two basics forms of advertising. The first people barely think about but is putting your products and your shop on display. It is not just the sign above your door but prices on your products. Think about this simple thing, did you EVER walk out of store because you couldn't find the price so thought "fuck this". BAD advertising. A lot about this basic advertising is convincing people to enter your shop because they think that what they want can be got at an acceptable price. For stores like bakeries this means charging the right amount for the right amount of convenience and quality. People complain about Starbucks being to expensive but they got fast steady quality service (compared to all the other alternatives at premium locations. I can get a cup at a burger chain for less next door at say Utrecht Central station in Holland but GOD the burger joints service is piss poor).
But if you want MORE customers then pass by traffic. What do you do... advertise? Do you READ advertisements? No? To busy. Exactly. Anyone that can afford a 5 dollar cup cake is far to busy to read the local newspaper. Same with banner ads. Who here sees banner ads? If you see banner ads, you are in a lower class. Elitist? Damn right.
Research has shown the Groupon's claims on age and income of their users are over-estimated. They are an older demographic and a poorer demographic. This is a group who hunts coupon's. They use a coupon and then don't come back unless they get another coupon. They are deal hunters.
If you got something to dump, then deal hunters might be worth going after but if you got a premium product that doesn't get 75% cheaper in total costs with bulk, then Groupon makes no sense.
Groupon works for HP Printers because HP makes its money on ink. It makes sense for products you need to shift now and you got to much off or make a very high margin on but otherwise, it NEVER makes sense.
Food products and services do not work with massive discounts aimed at bargain hunters.
It would be like selling Rolls Royce at 75% discount hoping for repeat business.
Not only do people not NEED two of them but those who buy it at the discount can't afford the regular price AND at the same time you are diluting the price of your product for your regular customers.
Or how would you feel if the person in front of you paid 1/4th of the price charged to you? If I was in that store behind a groupon customer and they tried to charge me full price they would be picking cupcakes out of their ears.
A european chain stunts with taxless days, basically a 20% cut that amounts to the regular sales tax. So... I never buy from them unless they run one of these events because I can wait for them or another chain to run one when buying a TV or such. Turn your customers into bargain hunters and bargains they will hunt.
Stay away from advertising unless you truly and fully understand what it is going to cost and what it is going to deliver you. It is like gambling. Or lawsuits. Casino's, lawyers and advertisers ALWAYS win.
All tablets and phones got root access by default. It just isn't you. But "they" got access.
Remember, mobile devices are like Windows 95. Lets share!
To keep the law is amazingly hard if people don't want to. It is rarely touched upon but the police heavily relies on the good will of the people its patrols else it will soon become clear how you can keep 99% down with far less then 1%. See Libya. Khadaffi and his sons looked more suprised then anything else at the end. WTF happened. And then he died at the hand of a pauper he didn't even know existed.
In Holland there was a recent story about the police not knowing what to do with the person who has been drink driving for 30 years. In Holland we have no 3 strike rule OR consecutive sentences. This means the entire punishment system is basically, don't do it again or we will have to ask you again.
This works... for those people that want to obey the laws (drink driving is dangerous for yourself and most people don't want to hurt other people) but not for those who don't. It doesn't really matter whether YOU consider a law just or unjust, if you don't feel like obeying it, you won't.
Try this, for the essential Godwin. Say you could travel back in time and kill Hitler. Would you? It is murder and you WILL die for it. Will you do it? Maybe you wouldn't but say your grandfather who did live through it, would he? Would he commit murder for say a pair of sneakers?
People have come to accept downloading content without paying for it as acceptable. Just as people wanting to travel back in time to kill X see it as acceptable to kill someone for a crime not yet committed. Because many of us have told ourselves that content creators are basically screwing us up the ass and the only way to get them back is to screw them back. By not paying. Voting with your dollars. It is hard to argue with this when for instance game companies seem so deaf to their customers.
Simple example. RPG type games and the invisible helmet option. It is a trivial thing to implement. A checkbox on the config screen that does or does not render the helmet so you can have the stats but also can see the face of the character you spent ages creating. Believe it or not but it matters to same sad people like me.
Any game coder who can confirm this? Oh hell, it ain't hard, kiddies on the net have implemented it within a few days of release with no toolkit. Skyrim is just the latest offender. And it is not as if they didn't have a warning. Dragon Age had the same problem AND again, it was users that had to fix it.
Hell Bethseda doesn't even SELL the collectors edition in my region. Just buying the regular edition instead will not send a signal to them. Neither will downloading the game but at least it saves me 40 bucks. They upset about me downloading. Me upset about NOT being able to spend a 140 bucks AND getting a buggy game with missing basic options that by now the industry should have figured out.
What all this ranting is supposed to lead to is that it is very hard to change peoples mind once they are made up. How many of you think it is okay to litter? Okay, most probably said no. How many of those smoke and do NOT throw their cigarette away whereever it damn well pleases them? Now, to clean up this pollution, each cigarette will have a 1 dollar charge added to it to clean up after your filthy addict ass. Agree?
No? But that is what the copyright charge on blank media is.
The only thing that charge did and a litter charge on cigarettes will do, is convince people they are now entitled to commit the offence they paid a fine for.
The cat is out of the bag and as any cat owner knows, it is impossible to put the cat back in.
Just register microsoft.xxx, their lawyers will explain it to you, while they rip you a new one in court.
Has EVERYONE forgotten about .mobi and .travel? There ARE already industry specific TLD's and they failed dismally. In fact, I am in the industry and when I asked at fairly high level people why .xxx was expected to go any better then .travel and .mobi it was awfully silent.
INCLUDING about the claim "well if nobody wants it the price will just drop" with the question "But you invested a fortune in lobbying so you will then just give up instead of using your bought politicians to mandate porn sites to buy an XXX domain".
Baby steps. First you register the jews, then you make them identifiable, well you know the rest. Godwin? Yes absolutely, it is not about the eradiction of undesirables BUT the .xxx domain has some very odd supporters. Lots of politicians that would dearly love to see porn gone (and freedom of expression) supported the .xxx domain. Why? I think a phase 2 might happen maybe not by design but by the business behind it who spend a fortune getting this wanting to make sure it succeeds. Again with Godwin but do you think the census takers at IBM who recorded the faith of people in Germany knew the final solution?
Anyway, ICANN has long been thinking about launching endless TLD's. Think .gun or .apple is bad? How about .paris and .washington? Each town, their own TLD, every business their own TLD.
.xxx is an experiment. Not so much about whether their is a market but how a market can be forcible created.
A lot of people think they can get .xxx to work for them, it is sold to some porn companies as in that the .xxx domain will be more legit so they can get better deals with mainstream business for advertising... yes, they really are that stupid.
Playboy had no problem getting mainstream advertising but most porn sites are a squalid dirty mag that even the industry itself would be reluctant to advertise in.
But you can claim you read playboy.COM for the articles. Good luck doing that with playboy.xxx
For decades the industry has attempted to seem legit, that they are just a business, just like Playboy is. And now a lot of them think the best way to do that is cover their faces in the cum of the .xxx tld. Yeah, that will work. Why not wear a star and paint your face black (the only difference between Germany and the US is that you don't need to get blacks to wear anything to tell them apart. People can just tell it seems. Must be the big noses)
All the other tech companies are used to dealing with Microsoft itself as partner, either for a product or in commitee. B&N probably has no relationship with MS other then as an end customer of Windows. Now that alone is enough to fuel a bitter hatred.
But basically, B&N has nothing to loose. If they loose they have to pay the same fee as if they didn't. It is not as if MS can hurt them in any other way.
Meanwhile MS has in one move ruined ALL its attempts to appear as if it wasn't the old evil MS anymore. The MS apologists who claim MS is no longer against openess or unwilling to play fair... well... they got to crawl back under the rock they came from and claim that this time MS Mobile Windows Phone Gazillion will be it!
First off, Jesus does not exist and if he did exist, do you think a guy nailed to a cross would cry for Americans who pollute the world and consume its resources and are to stupid to vote for Bush or anyone not Bush?
Thousands die of hunger and some beard in the sky is supposed to care for you?
How old was Dennis Ritchie when he died just recently? WELL above 50. If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood.
Anyway, when recorded music was itself new, it didn't need long at all to be understood by politics and have the current copyright introduced. It is about the maturity in the industry as in knowing how the game is played (bribes). Google just doesn't get it.
This ad is a good example. Wall of text rather then a heart-warming story of innocent and pure-blooded American Google being bastarized by the evil japanse Sony music.
If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable. A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream. Sure it sucks for the people down stream and there might be a lot of people downstream but the risk is calculable and limited.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents. Or at least not reliable enough. The public might want safe power but they are not willing to pay the price of 1 nuclear accident every couple decades.
Nuclear energy is the same as oil drilling, techs that for many reasons are necessary but nobody wants in their back yard OR simply spend enough money on to make it safe. And when it fails, it fails so enormously that people lose all sense of proportion. Hey Japan, sure you lost a sizable area of your country BUT you build your economy on cheap electricity. Surely it is worth it because you thought it was worth it back then when you decided to build them? Oh, that is not how voters think? How unexpected.
Nuclear tech doesn't fit in a capitalist democracy. You can't have reactors build by the lowest bidder at the whim of voters with no accountability.
Who is funding Kaspersky labs?
Remember that money makes for strange bedfellows. For instance, take Reuters. They been found to be lying in their reporting in this area... but what few THEN ask, why they ALWAYS been found lying to favor one side.
And if these companies are aiding Iran in keeping its nuclear facilities safe are they aiding it in nuclear development which it is not allowed to do according to UN regulations?
This whole case has more depth to it then just the west vs Iran. Somebody is playing games and we so far only got researchers with funny names and shady funding and Iran to prove any of this.
Remember this all originates from a country that blaims earth quakes on short skirts. To some the truth is not just a flexible concept but nothing different from propaganda shouted really loudly.
Heck, my wife hates Star Trek but enjoyed that movie
Do you think it is wise to broadcast your motive to the entire net while the police is still investigating her brutal and prolonged death?
Physical arcade games where you drove a physical toy car over a looping belt. No computer needed.
Neither was nazi germany all that bad, as long as you weren't on the list. That is why such regimes can continue to exist, because the majority isn't on the list and it is very unhuman (but very human) to risk getting on a list for someone else who is on a list.
That is why real heroes, like the people of Urk (fairly strict christians who had no real love or hate for jews but disliked people telling them what to do with a passion) are so fucking rare. It takes balls of steels to risk your safety for someone else. The fast majority did not. Ich habe es nicht gewust really means, I spend all my time looking the other way so it wouldn't happen to me.
And the US has been caught out many many times recently and in the past in making people disappear. Check all the foreign detainment camps operated by the CIA. It is not even a secret anymore, except by those like you who choose to look the other way.
He is the 1%. The king and his court are hardly going to be advocating for the foundation of a republic are they?
Remember this next time you watch TV or any other media. How many of the people you see in media are making minimum wage or even an average wage.
For that matter, how many here on slashdot do a real days work? Hint, it is 10:30 in holland as I post this. Do you think a factory worker has the same luxury?
I am not the 1%, I am somewhere in the middle but I came from the bottom and know just how much you can expect from the 1% in caring even the tiniest bit about anyone else. Bloomberg can paint himself with a donkey or an elephant, in reality he is filthy rich and cares only for himself.
And if you are discussing secrets in a cab... then what about the cabby overhearing smartass? Or are cabbies in your world deaf dumb and blind like you?
Here is a hint, if you got secrets, don't discuss them in other peoples places.
Name the tech giants. Siemens, Samsung, Sony, Toyota etc etc. Where do you think these companies came from? Where was the CD invented? TU-Delft Holland and Tokyo japan. You are right, there is no direct equivelant of Silicon valley. That is like saying that because no mountain ranges are the same as the alps the US doesn't have mountains.
Read tech news a bit more carefully, most of them have nothing to do with Silicon Valley anymore then the best movies got much to do with Hollywood.
But hey kid, keep dreaming the dream and everything will be alright... oh remind me again, how much of iPad tech is actually from the US? Produced in the US? So, you got a nerd producing the next big thing that never happens. Meanwhile the real world is going on elsewhere.